Indeed, it's medieval Latin.

> There's always some way for a man to exude verisimilitude of his choice.

Right, and there's nothing wrong with that. And there's no problem with spurious, osmotic self-identification, it just yields a lot of mess.

> Isn't it exciting in its own way?

To be honest, it makes very little difference as far as I'm concerned.

In traditional societies folks gave a whole lot more importance to how people were identified than to how they identified themselves.

This is the most important sentence here, and one I'll do well to remember for some later time. Sure, technology isn't the lone culprit; men had sobriquets for writing and publishing; people have named themselves and others on graffiti, even in Roman times. There's always some way for a man to exude verisimilitude of his choice.

This... this is just the beginning.

Isn't it exciting in its own way?

As for Huxley, I can't view his fiction as a dystopia. It's just the world the weak make for the weak.

In all fairness, "we" are going to great lengths to reduce ourselves to clumps of cells. Just hear 'em talking about the great achievements of their democracy, while they're preparing for poverty. Who knew that bipedal monkeys would be trained to beg for this state of affairs?

> The true end of humanity is all Huxley and no Orwell.

Huxley was pretty close to the mark with his essays on pacifism, although I'm pretty sure he himself had no idea of the extent to which his utopia could come to life.

> MMORPGs are the religion of our day

MMORPGs, TV shows, sports and so on. Pop culture has built for itself an entire pantheon!

> religion offers everyone a comforting illusion

If by that you mean that religion provides common folks with a convenient interpretation of fundamental metaphysical items, then sure. IMHO that alone doesn't make the contemplation of ideals and the meaning derived from it a worthless endeavour. On that matter, I will defer to Aristotle.

> Play this game and you'll embrace the comforting illusion that you don't live a meaningless life, doomed to be nothing more than cannon fodder for Corporation

Quite!

> the rest will be just gone

Until then, Zuck'll just sell them, or hell, give away for free ten billion pods equipped with free connections to the metaverse and the minimum amount of sustenance needed for... well, whatever it is they call living, i.e. the clumps of cells above.

Terrifying, but what can I say, let 'em enjoy it.

Ya know, I'd say religion was the MMORPG of its day, or, alternatively, MMORPGs are the religion of our day. Let's face it. People back then didn't really have IQs in the 80s. Not outside subsaharan Africa at least. If they looked at it lucidly, it was obvious to most of them that it's bullshit. The magic man in the sky, the water turning into wine, the coming back from the dead. Please. Clearly fairy tales. But they didn't looked at it lucidly, because religion offers everyone a comforting illusion: that you don't live a meaningless life, doomed to be nothing more than cannon fodder for Pharaoh. That you can be a hero... in your own mind. Just live "righteously", and no matter what happens in reality, you will be judged *individually* (this is crucial), and rewarded *invididually* with eternal life or whatnot. If that's not a reality distortion bubble, what is?

Is it any different today? Play this game and you'll embrace the comforting illusion that you don't live a meaningless life, doomed to be nothing more than cannon fodder for Corporation. You can be a hero on the screen, be looked up to... by NPCs (both in the Matrix and meatspace).

Ah, but it is different today. For one, stories about a magic man in the sky are just ideas. If you don't believe in them, they cannot fetter you, not without physical humans to enforce them. And there was plenty of space to hide from those humans. But machines are different. Machines are real. They can and will enforce nigh-perfect, invincibile, eternal dictatorial control on all of us. It is just a matter of time.

Pharaoh also needed that cannon fodder, needed to keep them alive. The "useless eaters" weren't truly useless in the long run, and he knew it. Now... although slower than techno-optimists believed, change is coming and most humans really are becoming superfluous. In Nature, superflous things have a tendency to disappear. When Corporation no longer needs all that cannon fodder, from the trucker to the Excel monkey, we won't become a planet of "creatives", 10 billion people sipping lattes at StarBucks designing logos. Nor will those 10 billion people live in a Matrix dreamworld. Why waste resources on them? No. The elites will still be there, there'll be as many "creatives" as there are now, likely even fewer, and the rest... why, the rest will be just gone. Gently or brutally exterminated, who knows, but exterminated nonetheless.

I'm so fun at parties.